History, doctrine, culture, books

Having heard nice things about the odd little book by Pierre Bayard How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read (ht: someone out there), I finally found it. And read it. Summary: You read a very, very small slice of all published books. You forget most of what you read, so you retain only a small part of the few books you actually read. Worse yet, you bend and twist what you do remember to fit your own personal matrix of ideas and experiences. So what is in your head after reading a book, even more so for a book you read years ago, likely bears little or no similarity to the actual text of the book. Maybe we should forget books, forget any claim to link to some text that we supposedly read and remember, and just talk creatively and imaginatively about our own ideas and experiences.

One can read the Book of Mormon as canonized scripture, to guide the Church and its members in doctrine and practice, or as a sign of Joseph Smith's calling to bring forth new scripture and establish a restored church. Then there is the possibility of reading the Book of Mormon as literature, to enlighten, uplift, and inspire the reader. So, how literary is it? How exactly does one read the Book of Mormon as literature?

Here is a casual review of Joe Spencer's An Other Testament: On Typology (Salt Press, 2012). Short summary: I like Salt Press. I like Joe Spencer. I like the book. I don't like typology.

Salt Press

On its website, Salt Press describes itself as "an independent academic press dedicated to publishing books that engage Mormon texts, show familiarity with the best contemporary thinking, remain accessible to non-specialists, and foreground the continuing relevance of Mormon ideas." The editorial board is a mix of prominent LDS bloggers and LDS academics. The publisher promotes "independent and open publishing," notably by making PDF copies of books available for free download. These are the right people doing the right sort of thing to upgrade the quality of scriptural commentary and discussion available to the general LDS audience. And this is a great publishing model; I hope it continues to thrive. Christmas is coming: buy all three of their books for someone you love.

Once upon a time, the rare article or essay on Mormonism was noteworthy and bloggable. Now, in this extended Mormon Moment, there are so many it is hard to even keep track of them. But Adam Gopnik's article "I, Nephi: Mormonism and its meanings" deserves special notice, not just because The New Yorker is widely read and respected but because it is a serious and informed discussion. Maybe the media is getting better when it comes to discussing Mormonism.

This is the fourth in a series of posts taking a broad look at the Book of Mormon. This post continues the discussion of the prior post, The Book of Mormon as Narrative, by considering verisimilitude. This term refers to how faithfully a text represents the real world or, to various degrees, depicts events that do not conform to the readers' view of the real world.

This is the third post in a series taking a broad view of the Book of Mormon (first, second). In this post I will discuss aspects of narrative encountered in the text. Not all scripture is narrative: consider the lengthy legal codes in the Torah and the moral exhortation found in James. Not all historical accounts are in the form of a narrative, although most history books written for the popular market are narrative histories. Most novels are in the form of a narrative, including historical fiction, which adds authorial speculation to large chunks of authentic history, often mixing fictional characters with actual historical figures and events.

Julie is posting detailed commentary and Kent is providing literary reflection; I'm afraid all I have to offer on the Book of Mormon is general observations. This week let's talk about situating the book as a whole, not so much in terms of content and form (which I'll address in later posts) but in terms of function and use. How does the Church use the Book of Mormon? How do you use the Book of Mormon?

This is the fourth in a series of reviews of Grant Hardy's Understanding the Book of Mormon: A Reader's Guide (OUP, 2010) that we are posting this week at Times and Seasons. It says something about the book that there is still a lot to talk about.

I just finished reading Terryl Givens' The Book of Mormon: A Very Short Introduction, a recent addition to Oxford University Press's wildly successful VSI series. It gives 125 informative pages on the content, structure, origin, and reception of the Book of Mormon. The book does a fair job of balancing competing views, no easy task for such a controversial subject.

The transcript of Elder Holland's talk "Safety for the Soul" has been posted at LDS.org, so it's time to take a closer look at it. By parsing, I don't mean twisting the meaning or presenting the speaker as saying something he did not say or did not intend. I simply mean reading the talk closely: the dictionary definition of "parse" is "to analyze critically." To whom was his talk addressed? What did he say? And what did he not say?

Per the Mormon Times, the Book of Mormon Archeological Forum is holding a conference on Saturday October 25 in Salt Lake City, uh, promoting the Limited Geography Hypothesis. It is interesting that if you Google "limited geography hypothesis" what you get is mostly Bloggernacle blogs. What does everyone else call it?

This is my first post on this year's Book of Mormon curriculum. LDS.org posts the course manual. Lesson 1 includes material on the keystone metaphor, as well as handy links to most of the scriptures referred to in the lesson. I'll try to post once a week on a topic related to the lesson for the week. The topic of this post is the keystone metaphor, based on a statement by Joseph Smith: "The Book of Mormon [is] the most correct of any book on earth, and the keystone of our religion" (HC 4:461). My main point is this: It's just a metaphor!

Gospel Cougar has posted a list of Book of Mormon word counts ... in a single blog post. Yes, it is a list of about 3500 words found in the Book of Mormon (just eyeballing it), along with the number of occurences. There are actually two lists, one alphetical and one sorted by frequency. This entry alone saved the Gospel Cougar blog from my end-of-year sidebar culling (sorry, these things must be done from time to time). The word "and" appears 16,321 times. "Lamanites" appears 693 times, while "Christ" appears 382 times. The most popular z-word is "Zarahemla" at 148. You can have a lot of fun with this tool.

Interesting how an editorial change of just one word in the one-page Introduction now printed in the Book of Mormon can generate so much discussion. Old wording: "... the Lamanites ... are the principal ancestors of the American Indians." New wording: "the Lamanites ... are among the ancestors of the American Indians" (emphasis added in both quotes). The Deseret News article on the change mentions Thomas Murphy and Simon Southerton, but provides quotes only from John L. Sorenson, an emeritus BYU anthropologist. The SL Trib article includes a quote from Southerton as well as a statement from a Doubleday editor that the change (made to the Doubleday edition of the Book of Mormon) was specifically requested by "LDS leaders." The SL Trib article also includes a quote from BCC's Kevin Barney. Interestingly, the Introduction accessible at LDS.org retains the "principal ancestors" phrase.

I stumbled onto the following article, which I'll make this week's online essay, a few weeks back: The Book of Mormon, Historicity, and Faith by Robert Millet of BYU. It is from Volume 2, No. 2 (Fall 1993) of the Journal of Book of Mormon Studies, a production of the Maxwell Institute. Millet takes a more ecumenical view of some issues than other LDS scholars, so I was curious what new views he would bring to the historicity discussion.

Here's a link to a news story sent to me by a reader: When Terror Came to the Mummies of the Amazon. Sounds like a grade-B horror flick, but it actually reports the archeological discovery of mummified Indians from pre-Inca Peru of about 600 years ago, likely from a group known as the Chachapoyas. Interesting bunch, these Chachapoyas:

The Chachapoyas were a tall, fairhaired, light-skinned race that some researchers believe may have come from Europe. Little is known about them except that they were one of the more advanced ancient civilisations in the area. Adept at fighting, they commanded a large kingdom from the year 800 to 1500 that stretched across the Andes.

I wonder if they dug up any mummified horses with them? Now that would be something to write home about.

In yet another skirmish in the continuing debate over DNA and the Book of Mormon, the Signature Books website recently posted a Ron Priddis response to Blake Ostler's reply (here and here) to Tom Murphy's article "Lamanite Genesis, Genealogy, and Genetics," chaper 3 in American Apocrypha (2002, Signature). [An earlier version of Murphy's paper is available online here. Also, Ostler has now replied to Priddis here and here, with some additional exchanges between the two later in the thread.] I will summarize these articles and add some commentary.

I received an email from a reader concerned about how to respond to some stories he was hearing about the printing of the Book of Mormon in 1830. Specifically, there's a book and a speaker out there claiming the actual printing of the book, at Grandin's print shop in Palmyra in 1829-30, could not have been accomplished by the normal printing technology of that time and that it must, therefore, have been miraculous, in some unspecified way. Here's an article at Meridian Magazine that summarizes and responds to the book and its claims. I'll summarize my response, then invite your comments and feedback.

I haven't posted an online essay of the week for some time now. So let's try Horses in the Book of Mormon, a popular take on the horses question directed to a general Mormon audience, posted at Meridian Magazine. Meridian got the article from the Ancient America Foundation, whose About page explains: "AAF publications provide evidence for authenticity of the Book of Mormon." As long as you have a testimony of Mesoamerica, that is. Otherwise, you are one of the "uninformed Latter-day Saints [who] continue to promote other areas."

I received an email from a reader who is a member "in good standing" with a devoutly Mormon wife, but he is puzzling over the Book of Abraham (BoA). After some research into its origins and status, he finds it to be "not at all related to the Egyptian writings" from which it was supposedly translated. He's wondering how I deal with the BoA issue. While many Mormons are largely ignorant of the whole BoA issue, I think most bloggers have some familiarity with it and have come to some settled opinion, so I'll just throw that out as a general question to everyone: How do you deal with the Book of Abraham issue? I'll give some links and add my own response below.

The original 1830 "as dictated" English text of the Book of Mormon was entirely devoid of punctuation, it seems. That is sort of odd: punctuation is not some optional decoration, it is an essential component of clear written text, establishing the proper relations between various sentences, clauses, phrases, and words that make up the text. If the Urim and Thummim didn't do punctuation, it was a faulty or incomplete translation instrument. So where did the punctuation come from? Meet John H. Gilbert, punctuator and thus unacknowledged "co-translator" of the Book of Mormon.

RNB reposts that Kenneth Taylor, the author of The Living Bible, died last week. The Living Bible was the first plain language Bible to really hit it big; it was wildly popular with the Bible-reading public from its first appearance in 1971, especially among youth. The LDS Church never embraced this movement; instead, the Church regularly rededicates itself to archaic language in the King James Bible and the Book of Mormon; in the thee's and thou's of our prayer language; even in our titles, such as the Relief Society or the Mutual Improvement Association. If you just can't shake the idea of a Living Book of Mormon, go find a copy of the Easy-to-Read Book of Mormon (see this FARMS review of the book for a few sample excerpts). It will give hours of fun to the entire family.

Parley P. Pratt: The Apostle Paul of MormonismGivens and Grow's warts-and-all biography of this energetic missionary, author, and apostle whose LDS career spanned Joseph Smith's life, the emigration to Utah, and Brigham Young's early leadership of the Church in Utah. My Review